Half Asia is mourning Lord Mountbatten with a solemnity granted to no other European. Throughout India, Burma and Pakistan, people still feel that here was the only...

The new technology of terror ( Ferdinand Mount In The Century of Total War, Raymond Aron argued that what makes modern wars different is 'technical surprise'. Soldiers and...

The Prime Minister of Ireland, Mr Jack Lynch, once stated in my presence with undisguised relief that the partition of Ireland would be unlikely to end in his lifetime. This...

John Hackett The people whom Mountbatten knew must number millions — quite apart from the many millions more who knew Mountbatten. He will be very easily remembered. He moved...

Christopher Booker In the wake of the news from County Sligo and County Down it is hard this week to write about anything else. When Airey Neave was killed earlier this year,...

Christopher Walker Belfast Following this week's callous murders of Lord Mountbatten, innocent members of his family and at least 18 British soldiers, two simultaneous but...

Richard West County Galway The Reverend Ian Paisley and his Protestant supporters must have smiled when they heard that the Pope is to go on pilgrimage to Knock in the province...

Murray Sayle Hong Kong Last week Britain's stubbornly surviving Asian colony was officially declared a cholera zone, starting the customary run on inoculation centres at...

Michael Holroyd A week? or twenty years remain? And then — what kind of death? A losing fight with frightful pain Or a gasping fight for breath? John Betjeman Before I was...

The Berkeley affair Sir: We were taken aback by some claims contained in the article 'The Mis sion that failed' • by Mr Humphry Ber keley (4 August). We constituted a two men...

All the conspirators Richard Cobb The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution Albert Goodwin (Hutchinson £12) This is a very...

Nicholas von Hoffman R ockefeller of New York Robert Connery an Gerald Gerald Benjamin (Cornell £10.50) T he Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, fired his C hief medical examiner the...

Anthony Storr The Natural History of the Mind Gordon Raftray Taylor (Secker E6.95) Mr Taylor's new book will be of immense interest not only to the educated general public at...

Patrick Cosg rave Foxy Ferdinand: Tsar of Bulgaria Stephen Constant (Sidgwick and Jackson £10) After Russian intrigue and violence had driven the gallant Alexander of...

Francis King Birdy William Wharton (Cape £4.95) Some psychiatrists interpret their patients' dreams of flying as fantasies of masturba tion; others see in them an atavistic...

A supra-national Israeli Hans Keller The first British performance of Josef Tal's Third Symphony will open next Wednesday's Prom (5 September) by the Israel Philharmonic under...

Traviata' north and south. Rodney Milnes a Travlata (Edinburgh Festival) Travlata (Coliseum) 1 suPpose /by ordinary critical standards !).. l ere are things wrong with Kent...

Iron Bridge John McEwen Sunk in the depths of that sinister country, Shropshire, is the valley of Coalbrookdale. Today it is a rural place but in 1709 it witnessed an...

Vehicular Peter Jenkins The Gin Game (Lyric) WOyzeck; Chobham Armour (Half Moon). The tandem has always been a more popular vehicle on Broadway than on Shaftesbury Avenue....

Counted out Ted Whitehead Dracula (Empire Leicester Square) What's to be done about Dracula? Counted out, he always reappears for another round.. After the spate of Hammer...

Unique Richard Ingrams A few weeks ago in this column the trade unionist Clive Jenkins was stated to be appearing on a programme called A Question of Sex alongside the...

D-Gay-Day Taki It was Cervantes, I believe, who said that one can tell a man by his friends. That may have been true a longtime ago, especially in Spain, but I doubt if that...

Changeover Jeffrey Bernard • The patient was very cheer/id, asked for a glass ofmilk and sat up in bed and joked with nurses after a transplant operation.' The red light over...

Questions Geoffrey Wheatcroft There are many different kinds of question. There is the question asked to elicit an answer of which the questioner is ignorant. Then there is...

No. 1080: If only ... Set by P.W.R. Foot: If only they could speak! Competitors are invited to supply a script of about 120 words for the Mona Lisa, the Laughing Cavalier, the...

Manila Raymond Keene In the Spectator of IS August I discussed the first event of the 1979 Asian Grandmaster circuit in Jakarta. The second leg in Manila involved a similar...